Rockbites: TVT, King Biscuit move forward with music downloads

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September 2000 • Rockbites Alternative Daily

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TVT, King Biscuit move forward with music downloads
27 September 2000

Yesterday New York based indie label TVT Records started selling a catalog of 25 albums as downloadable Windows Media files through online music store HMV.com. The downloadable albums are copy protected, less than CD quality, and cost CDN$10.99 (US$7.38) each. And according to the HMV Web site, you cannot listen to them on Mac OS, Windows NT, Linux... or anything other than Windows 95/98—they require a particular version of the Windows Media Player. Digital Rights Management (DRM) company Supertracks arranged the system.
    Artists included in the TVT/HMV deal include The Eastsidaz, Guided By Voices, KMFDM, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, XTC, and several others.
    Taking another tack entirely, and one that appears to have more promise, San Francisco encryption company SecureMedia (backed in part by Sony) announced yesterday their own system for applying DRM to music downloads. The SecureMedia system supports users getting bonus tracks online when they own an encoded CD. It also allows users to email each other copy-protected and play-limited songs from the CD; their friends don’t need any special software to listen, and it will work even if they prefer Linux or Mac OS to Windows—unlike TVT/HMV’s Windows Media albums, SecureMedia files will play on any MP3 player software including WinAmp, SoundApp, and QuickTime Player.
    The first release using the SecureMedia system is King Biscuit Flower Hour Presents Todd Rundgren Live, released yesterday. Rundgren, speaking in a telephone press conference from Hawaii, said he just heard about the arrangement last Thursday. “My interest and my endorsement follows on my own particular concerns which are that the record industry has to come up with ways to address changing attitudes in the audience. The valuation of music is shifting....” Rundgren said he sees new approaches such as SecureMedia’s as addressing, better than does Napster, for example, “...the problem for an artist like myself of finding alternative methods to promote music when the traditional venues such as radio are not necessarily open to what you have to expose.”
    SecureMedia CEO Jack Oswald spoke with Rockbites this morning about his company’s download technology and about future directions including a system that would allow users to 'download' an album’s worth of tracks from an encoded CD to a computer in about a minute. Such CDs would include the normal full-CD quality tracks playable in any CD player, along with professionally ripped versions in encrypted MP3 format. To play the tracks you’d need a license that comes with the CD. | TVT Records | | HMV.com | | SecureMedia | | Todd Rundgren | | top of page |

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